27.365, Review: Applied Ling; General Ling; Socioling: Tagg (2015)

Tue Jan 19 21:22:18 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-365. Tue Jan 19 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.365, Review: Applied Ling; General Ling; Socioling: Tagg (2015)

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Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2016 16:21:43
From: Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky [zsubrinszky.zsuzsanna at kkfk.bgf.hu]
Subject: Exploring Digital Communication

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-1218.html

AUTHOR: Caroline  Tagg
TITLE: Exploring Digital Communication
SUBTITLE: Language in Action
SERIES TITLE: Routledge Introductions to Applied Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky, Budapest Business School

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry 

SUMMARY

Edited by Caroline Tagg, the volume discusses real-world issues pertaining to
digital communication, and explores how linguistic research addresses these
challenges. With relevant research examples, tasks and a glossary taken from
diverse forms of digital media, the author aims to demystify any perceived
divide between online and offline communication. The volume is composed of
three sections (A, B and C), entitled ‘Problems and Practices’,
‘Interventions’, and ‘Theory’, and each section is further divided into two
parts; the book contains 21 chapters in total. The issues raised in relation
to digital communication throw light on language use and practices in general;
therefore, it is an invaluable resource not only for users of digital
communication but for linguists, as well as for under- and postgraduate
students taking Language and New Media, and Language and Communication Studies
modules within Applied Linguistics. 

Section A, ‘Problems and Practices’, includes the implications of digital
media for language and literacy and its effects on how we portray ourselves,
manage our privacy and connect with others. In Part I, ‘Digital language and
literacy’, the focus of concern is language itself, including the effect of
digital communications on spelling and grammar, its impact on reading
practices, and on the way in which people write. Also, the author looks at
fears about the dominance of English on the web, which reflects and
perpetuates wider power relations. Chapter 1, ‘Is digital communication
ruining language?’ is concerned with the effects of digital communication on
language use, which are based on misconceptions, such as the wider use of
unconventional forms, fixed and prescribed codes, and the existence of
competition between digitalese and ‘proper’ forms. In Chapter 2, ‘Has the web
changed how we read?’, the author deals with the potential significance of
textisms in digital communication. She argues that while print reading
involves extensive, linear reading, online reading with the use of hypertext
has entirely replaced printed books. At the same time, Tagg claims that both
forms will continue to exist side-by-side, and consequently, digital reading
may force us to re-evaluate the practices and theories associated with print
literacy. Chapter 3, ‘Is the web devaluing what it means to be an author?’
represents changing ideas about authorship moving us away from the lonely
genius writer to the collaborative, community-based writer. The author
believes that these changes blur the line between writers and readers as they
both contribute to the writing process. Chapter 4, ‘Does the internet further
the global dominance of English?’, focuses on the online presence of minority
languages, how technological factors affect language choice online, to what
extent political and economic factors determine the position of these minority
languages and finally, what opportunities these languages will have in shaping
culturally authentic internet media in the future. 

In Section A, Part II, ‘Social issues and social media’, the author looks at
online identity, which poses the two seemingly contradictory problems of
anonymity and exhibitionism, as well as online privacy and cyberbullying.
Chapter 5, entitled ‘From anonymity to self-promotion: are we ever ourselves
on social media?’ deals with the popular concerns arising from people’s
abilities to hide or distort their identities online. This affordance may be
taken up for various reasons, ranging from criminal and immoral actions to
people’s attempts to promote the unrealistically sunny side of their lives on
social network sites (e.g. the rise of selfies). Chapter 6, ‘What are the
implications of social media for privacy?’ begins with Zuckerberg’s (2010)
claim that social norms regarding openness and sharing have changed
considerably throughout the 21st century and the young are no longer able to
make reasoned decisions about what can be made public and what should be kept
private. This concern is further elaborated  by the author’s providing
suggestions and strategies regarding how privacy issues should be managed in
Chapter 7, ‘Is social media making us less social offline?’ In summarizing the
apparent pervasiveness of aggressive behaviour online, in Chapter 8, ‘What can
be done about trolls and online bullying?’, Tagg makes a distinction between
flaming (‘aggressive or hostile communication occurring via computer-mediated
channels’), trolling (‘someone who deliberately disrupts online forums to get
pleasure at the participants’ expense’), and cyberbullying (‘ when the
aggressor repeatedly targets one person’). The preferred solutions to these
incidents may involve technological adaptations and attempts to educate
parents and young people.

Section B ‘Interventions’, demonstrates the ways in which applied linguists
have sought to understand through empirical investigation what people are
actually doing when they communicate digitally. Part I, ‘Digital language and
literacy’ uses literacy in a rather narrow sense to refer to the ability to
spell and to manage other basic writing skills. Chapter 9, ‘Why digital
communication may be good for literacy’, shows us positive correlations
between digitalese and literacy skills by challenging the assumption that
digital communication is necessarily having a negative impact on literacy.
Moreover, spelling variants are considered as meaning-making resources,
although they occur much less frequently than currently supposed. Chapter 10,
‘Exploring digital literacies‘, looks at the attempts made by applied
linguists to understand the specifics of particular genres of online texts,
and how they need to be read. Blogs, for instance, illustrate how online texts
provide us with a different kind of reading experience from what we are
familiar with offline. Chapter 11, ‘Using the web as a space for writing’,
presents two online writing spaces – Wikipedia and fan fiction – and how their
different social purposes, norms regulations and technological affordances
shape and are shaped by users’ language practices. Wikipedia appears to be an
example of effective collaboration, which is managed by a dedicated community
of editors; meanwhile, fan fiction brings globally dispersed fans of
particular works together to entertain themselves through their own stories.
Chapter 12, ‘Using more than one language online’, looks into the way 
internet users switch between different languages and shows that arguments
about the online dominance of English are in fact more complex than they might
initially appear. Linguistic description of actual practices and visual
graphic resources reveal how people mix languages in various, intricate ways
that defy easy categorisation into one or another language.

In Section B, Part II, ‘Social issues and social media’, highlights the
importance of traditional social roles online. In Chapter 13, ‘Performing
identity online‘, the author explores the findings of empirical
language-related research into the ways in which offline identities and
relationships are reconstructed in online situations. While offline identities
continue to be held up as ‘authentic’, communicative demands peculiar to
online contexts allow people to alter their presentations of identity through
acts of expression to sound more convincing. In Chapter 14, ‘Audience design
on social media’, Tagg presents the way people manage their privacy through
language choices ranging from vague expressions to multilingual
code-switching. She reveals how users of social media adopt often complex
strategies to signal what is private and what is public, by explicitly or
implicitly targeting or excluding particular individuals. Chapter 15,
‘Constructing virtual communities’, defines the types of virtual communities,
which are mainly based on shared interests (e.g., support groups or task-based
groups) or social variables (e.g., hashtag communities or node-oriented
networks). The author also highlights the key role that language plays as
users establish and maintain relationships with each other. Chapter 16, ‘The
linguistics of online aggression’, emphasizes the importance of linguistic
research, which can be useful not only in detailing the role played by
language as part of any online aggressive encounter, but in revealing the way
in which aggression is constructed, negotiated and challenged through
language. Also, it is argued that aggression differs between contexts and can
only be explored by looking at how participants respond to potential
aggressors.

Section C, ‘Theories’, refers to applied linguistics theories which are in the
process of transforming how we conceptualize language itself and thus how
different languages, speakers and practices are evaluated. Part I, ‘Digital
language and literacy’ justifies the findings of applied linguistics by
focusing on multiliteracies, translanguaging, and heteroglossia. Chapter 17,
‘Multiliteracies’ focuses on the way in which linguists since the 1970s have
conceptualised ‘literacy’. It is argued that ‘literacy’ is not a mechanical
process of decoding and encoding but is a wider social practice deeply
embedded in particular roles within a literate society. In many respects,
digital literacy practices extend rather than break with existing practices
but, at the same time, the internet is blurring the line between traditionally
private and public spaces, reaching a wider audience, making a greater impact
and taking on an enhanced social value. Chapter 18, ‘Translanguaging via a
superdiverse internet’, describes a multilingual practice or process known as
‘translanguaging’ by which users draw on any and all of the languages in their
repertoires, without necessarily making conscious distinctions between them.
In this way, the internet has played a crucial role in fostering and extending
superdiverse contexts (e.g., Varis and Wang, 2011) by providing spaces which
transcend geographical boundaries and distances and in which people can come
together around shared interests. Chapter 19, ‘Heteroglossia’, allows digital
researchers to investigate hybridity in all its forms and in particular to
consider the political and ideological functions, motivations and tensions
that lie behind online diversity. Despite attempts to operationalise the term
for the analysis of specific texts, heteroglossia is likely to remain a
somewhat fluid analytical concept, lacking the precision of the categories it
displaces: code-switching, multimodality and language variation.

In Section C, Part II, ‘Social issues and social media’, the
reconceptualization of language in social media takes place, where it is
viewed as a process rather than a product. Chapter 20, ‘Identities in
interaction’, is structured around the five principles of social and
linguistic accounts of identity: emergence, positionality, indexicality,
relationality and partialness (Bucholtz and Hall, 2005). The author argues
that while the circumstances may be novel and thus attention grabbing, the
process of identity construction is not; therefore, online actors should
reconfigure their offline identities to perform themselves in a new way
online. And finally, Chapter 21, ‘Sociolinguistic communities’ outlines the
profound changes in the development of the concept of ‘community’, given the
quickening pace of globalisation, the shake-up of traditional structures and
sources of authority, the greater possibility for mobility, and people’s
increasing ability to use digital communications to establish networks beyond
their immediate vicinity. Tagg notes that online communities do not form in
isolation from the offline world but are shaped by offline social trends and
practices.

EVALUATION

This book is a welcome contribution to the growing literature on language use
and digital practices. The author questions to what extent internet-mediated
communications differ from other interactions, why we should focus on a range
of problems associated with the internet, and finally how language can help
tackle these complex issues. Caroline Tagg also engages with important social
perspectives, ranging from privacy, to isolation and to the increasingly
blurred boundaries between online and offline communication. However, she does
not claim to offer solutions to problems perceived to be caused by digital
technology and nor will she necessarily calm all readers’ worries. What the
author aims to do is provide insights from applied linguistics that enable
readers to make informed judgements about the digital communication practices
in which they and those around them are engaging.

The major strength of this book lies in the practical tasks and questions
making the reader reflect on the issues dealt with in each chapter (e.g., How
many languages you use online, how and why; or Find an example of online
aggression and analyse it in terms of linguistic resources or the victims’
response), as well as the extremely useful glossary at the end of the book. 

The book takes an innovative ‘practice to theory’ approach, with a
back-to-front structure, which leads the reader from real-world problems,
through a discussion of intervention to theoretical foundations. However, what
made me as a reader a bit confused about the book is the structure itself.
Although the author’s aim is to follow the ethos of the Routledge Applied
Linguistics series, starting with the Problems and practices, then
Interventions and Theories, it is rather difficult for the reader to orient
himself/herself within these three major parts as they all have the same
sub-chapter titles (i.e., Digital language and literacy and Social issues and
social media). Since language and social issues in many cases overlap (e.g.,
in the Theory part), perhaps it would have been better to leave these headings
out entirely as the chapter titles show whether they are about linguistic or
social issues.

Overall, this volume is an invaluable source of digital communication issues,
which will certainly be of interest to scholars and students of communication
and language studies. 

REFERENCES

Bucholtz, M. & Hall, K. (2005). ‘Identity and interaction: a sociocultural
linguistic approach’, Discourse Studies 7/4-5, 585-614.

Varis, P. & Wang, X. (2011). ‘Superdiversity on the internet: A Case from
China’, Diversities 13/2, 71-83.

Zuckerberg, M. (2010). ‘Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: TechCrunch interview at
the Crunchies’. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoWKGBloMsU.
Accessed: 4 January 2014.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky is Associate Professor in the English Department at
Budapest Business School, College of International Management and Business.
Her research interests include discourse analysis, intercultural communication
and English for Specific Purposes. She has published on business
communication, intercultural communication and politeness issues in business
emails.

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